Matthew Komatsu and I could not be in more different places. While I shiver in the 60-something-degrees of my Southern California office, Komatsu has just come in from cross-country skiing in the Alaska cold, and during our Zoom call I can see the pillowy whiteness of the landscape out of the window behind him. Likewise, his work experience is diametrically different from mine: I might joke about being “in the trenches” of publishing, but Komatsu, as a member of the National Guard and a veteran of what’s called the “Forever War,” has really been there.
Komatsu has written about his military experience for publications like the New York Times and GQ, but he’s also written about his identity as a Japanese American for Longreads and, most recently, for Flyfusion, a fly-fishing magazine. He’s also the nonfiction editor for the Air Force Academy’s War, Literature, and the Arts literary journal.
I ask Komatsu what he thinks we mean when we talk about literature from veterans. “My most present perspective,” says Komatsu, “is really from the foxhole of people who have participated in what we refer to as the ‘Forever War.’ So basically, post-9/11 conflict, Iraq and Afghanistan are obviously the
